Ditching Big Cloud For Personal Projects

Choosing self-hosted solutions over big cloud convenience.

I'll admit it: I am a slave to convenience. The perfect Apple customer. For years, I leaned hard into managed services by U.S.-based Cloud giants like AWS, Digital Ocean, Vercel or Netlify for personal projects. It was effortless. Spin up a service, click a few buttons, done. No hardware hassles, no 3 a.m. troubleshooting.

But the world’s shifting. Geopolitical tensions are spiking, and decision-makers keep doubling down on questionable calls. More voices are shouting for EU-based cloud solutions. Time will tell whether companies like Scaleway can rise to the occasion. But it opened another, more present, question. Do I actually want to host my private services on these providers?

I’m not some enterprise juggling auto-scaling or intricate networking setups. I'm just a guy in need of some CPU, RAM and control on a machine to host my projects on.

So I'm ditching the Cloud giants. I migrated everything to rented Hetzner servers, expecting a chore. Instead, I found freedom and a new obsession. I’ve built a lean, European-based, self-hosted stack that’s mine, and it’s a hell of a lot better than the overpriced convenience I used to swallow. For anyone who's interested to know what powers my small rebellion:

Hetzner:
It's reliable, affordable, and local. I can get 5x-10x more per € spent than with Big Cloud.

Coolify:
The open-source wizard that ties it all together. I bring the servers, Coolify brings the slick management. Proxy servers, Docker setups, rolling deployments, PR-based builds — all automatic.

Netbird:
Open-Source Zero-trust networking with WireGuard VPNs. Locks down some of my private services, like my wiki server for my documentation. I also really like their UI design.

Umami:
Self-hosted, privacy-first Web Analytics service. Ditches Google Analytic's creepy tracking and replaces it with a simple and straightforward setup that does not rely on cookies and respects users data.

n8n:
Visual workflows for automation that connect everything without me drowning in scripts. I'm the first to write my own code for some small independent tasks but I can not deny the convenience n8n brings, if I want to just glue something basic together that just needs to work.

Docmost:
Self-hosted documentation server to keep my sensitive docs off SaaS servers.

BetterStack:
A monitoring SaaS for logs, uptime, and performance. It’s my last outsourced piece. My Grafana skills aren't there yet to fully replace it.

Back in my cloud-slave days, I'd have paid for all of this. Storage, compute, bandwith, all inflated by "convenience". Now, with Docker Compose and Coolify, I can spin up new isolated PostgreSQL server in just three clicks. Hetzner's flat rates mean no surprises, and I'm not subsidizing some Silicon Valley campus. Sure, self-hosting takes effort but it's empowering. I'm not just buying; I'm building.

Big Cloud’s convenience came at a price I'm no longer willing to pay for my personal projects. Data's power, and I'm keeping it close. I was seduced by simplicity but the world's too messy for that now. Self-Hosting is my rebellion, and it's damn good. Try it for your next project. You'll wonder why you ever settled.